Friedrich Merz arrived in Washington this week alongside Europe’s most senior leaders, ostensibly to coordinate the continent’s response to Trump’s Ukraine designs. Here was Germany’s moment to demonstrate the leadership it perpetually claims to seek – a chance to shape the conversation that will determine Europe’s security architecture for years to come. Instead, before the Chancellor could even present his case to the Americans, his own foreign minister Johann Wadephul delivered a masterclass in diplomatic self-sabotage from Berlin.

Germany must play ‘an important role’ in any future peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, declared the CDU politician, before categorically ruling out German soldiers on Ukrainian soil. ‘That would presumably overwhelm us,’ he explained with the sort of defeatist precision that has become his government’s signature. In a single sentence, Wadephul had kneecapped his own Chancellor’s negotiating position, advertising Germany’s limitations rather than its capabilities to anyone listening.

Nothing feeds populists like politics’ inability to address change

This wasn’t merely unfortunate timing – it was the latest instalment in a pattern of cabinet colleagues undermining Merz’s already tentative efforts at international leadership. Whether on defence spending, migration policy or economic reform, the Chancellor finds himself repeatedly ambushed by ministers who seem determined to advertise Germany’s unwillingness to shoulder serious responsibilities. One might call it capitulation before the first battle was fought, but this represents something more systematic: the crystallisation of a political culture that has made strategic irrelevance into an art form.

Here lies the exquisite tragedy of modern Germany: a nation trapped between its aspirations and its neuroses, too large to be irrelevant yet too terrified to actually lead. While Merz and other European leaders huddle in the White House, desperately hoping to dissuade Trump from........

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